Prime Minister Narendra Modi co-chaired the AI Action Summit last week in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. The week-long summit culminated in a High-Level Segment which was attended by global leaders, policymakers, and industry experts.
In his address, Prime Minister Modi noted that the world was at the dawn of the AI age where this technology was fast writing the code for humanity and re-shaping polity, economy, security and society. Emphasising that AI was very different from other technological milestones in human history in terms of impact, he called for collective global efforts to establish governance and standards that uphold shared values, address risks and build trust.
He further added that governance was not just about managing risks but also about promoting innovation and deploying it for the global good. In this regard, he advocated for ensuring access to AI for all, especially the Global South. He called for democratising technology and its people-centric applications so that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals becomes a reality. Alluding to the success of India-France sustainability partnership through initiatives such as the International Solar Alliance, the PM stated that it was only natural that the two countries were joining hands to forge an innovation partnership for a smart and responsible future.
He highlighted India’s success in building a Digital Public Infrastructure for its 1.4 billion citizens based on open and accessible technology. Talking about India’s AI Mission, the PM noted that India, considering its diversity, was building its own Large Language Model for AI. He underlined that India was ready to share its experience to ensure that the benefits of AI reach everyone. The Prime Minister announced that India will be hosting the next AI Summit.
The Paris Declaration
The summit ended with a declaration that outlined policies for ensuring AI is “open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy”.
Some 60 countries signed the declaration but notably the United Kingdom and the United States did not.
The UK cited national security concerns as its reason while the US did not specify exactly why it did not sign the doctrine but the country’s Vice President, JD Vance, warned delegates in Paris that too much regulation would stifle innovation.
In his speech in the Grand Palais, Vance made it clear the US was not going to be held back from developing the tech by global regulation or an excessive focus on safety.
“We need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it, and we need our European friends, in particular, to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation,” he said.
China was also challenged. Speaking in front of the country’s vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance warned his peers against cooperating with “authoritarian” regimes – in a clear reference to Beijing.
Experts at the summit told Euronews Next that the declaration did not go far enough to address the possible risks and harms caused by AI.
“I think that the communique doesn’t adequately speak to the sort of real-world risks and harms,” said David Leslie, director of ethics and responsible innovation research at The Alan Turing Institute.
Some of the most pressing risks of AI include bias, cybersecurity, and data privacy issues.
“Action obviously means forward action and progressive action in terms of advancing opportunities for growth and economic benefit,” he told Euronews Next. “But action also has to do with redressing the set of existing risks and harms that over the last couple of years, and especially with the scaling of the production and user-generated AI systems, has become sort of obvious to researchers in the field,” he added.
Lingering concerns over safety
The failure to achieve consensus over a seemingly uncontroversial document, says Guardian, makes achieving meaningful global governance of AI appear an even more distant prospect. The first summit, at Bletchley Park in the UK in 2023, at least achieved an agreement between major nations and tech firms over AI testing – albeit on a voluntary basis.
But safety was not at the forefront in Paris despite ongoing concerns. Yoshua Bengio, a world-renowned computer scientist and chair of a major safety report released before the summit, told the Guardian in Paris that the world was not addressing the implications of highly intelligent AIs.
“We have a mental block on the idea that there will be machines that are smarter than us,” he said.
Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s AI unit, called for unity in dealing with AI after the lack of agreement over a declaration.
“It’s incredibly important the international community continues to come together and discuss the future of AI. We all have to be on the same page about the future we’re working to create.”
Pointing to potentially worrying scenarios such as powerful AI systems behaving deceptively, he added: “These concerns are not far-off or far-fetched, nor are they limited to one particular geography. They are global concerns that require focused, international cooperation.” Safety aside, some key themes were given a prominent hearing at the summit. Macron’s AI envoy, Anne Bouverot, said the current environmental trajectory of AI was “unsustainable” while the General Secretary of the UNI Global Union, Christy Hoffman, said AI could become an “engine of inequality” by driving productivity gains at the cost of workers’ welfare.